Does the Future of Smart Grid Apps Have Three Colors? via @greentechmedia

photo courtesy of tompagenet, creative commons Most smart grid applications combine new data and functionality from devices like smart meters with data and functionality from existing systems like customer information systems (CIS), outage management systems (OMS) and the like. This means that IT projects to build applications used for theft detection, dynamic pricing, and proactive outage determination are not green-field exercises. Rather, smart grid is an exercise in building composite applications. For an analogy, think in terms of retrofitting a newfangled energy management system into an old home, rather than building a smart home from scratch. This is where service-oriented architecture (SOA) comes in handy. SOA is both a style of programming and a set of enabling technologies. Instead of “hard-coding” applications to each other using programming interfaces (APIs), ...